The California dream is dead, but North County's university promises 'magic'

Toward the end of her annual “Report to the Community,” Karen Haynes, the preternaturally upbeat president of Cal State San Marcos, allowed a bitter-cold draft to blow through the huge circuslike tent in which she was speaking early Thursday morning.

“The California Master Plan for Higher Education is dead,” she said, “because the social compact itself is broken.”

A week earlier, during a budget forum, Haynes evoked the same uncharacteristic gloom.

“It is no doubt that the Master Plan for Higher Education in California is broken,” she judged.

This is harsh global news from a university president who insists that the prospects for her still-growing campus are, in a word, “magic.”

This is a little like a Chargers cheerleader yelling: “The Bolts are looking waaay up, but the NFL is going belly up! Yaaaay, team!”

The state’s 50-year-old postsecondary plan, the three-legged brainchild of the late UC President Clark Kerr (and signed into law by Gov. Pat Brown, Jerry’s dad, in 1960), was an elegantly simple blueprint for universal higher education, a well-established golden boon for Boomers by the time I graduated from high school in 1965. In brief:

The top 12.5 percent of the state’s students would be eligible for one of the prestigious UC universities.

CSU, the state university system of which San Marcos is a young member, would accept the top third of the state’s high-school graduates.

Two-year community colleges would offer trade-related courses to anyone, as well as the first two years of college courses. In those green salad days, Kerr’s plan anticipated that more than half of UC’s graduates would have transferred from two-year colleges.

The gift (that, sadly, could not keep giving) was tuition-free education guaranteed to all California residents. Fees for services like parking and housing? Sure. Tuition to pay for inherent costs like instruction? Never.

Over the years, however, free tuition gave way to ever-escalating fees. At this point, the two words — tuition and fees — are virtually interchangeable.

To help close a $25 billion-plus budget gap, Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing to slash $500 million from CSU’s budget. By Haynes’ calculations, this is a return to 1999-2000 revenues but with 70,000 more students to serve systemwide. Not surprisingly, tuition/fees are going up and up.

Bottom line, a large percentage of students — wealthy California residents ineligible for grants and out-of-state students who pay sky-high tuitions — are shouldering more and more of the costs. Once a free pass to upward mobility, state universities and colleges are turning less and less exceptional.

“The maddening part of this,” she said Thursday, “is that education and research have proved over and over that they are not a cost but rather an investment that produces economic vitality and, as I have repeatedly said, this investment in higher education offers the best rate of return on investment and yet we continue to be treated as part of the problem. But the inescapable truth is that we are a significant part of the solution.”